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Marco ASF Couto Nov 2013
"Have you forgotten your ticket... or your luggage?"
Because I wish you did.
I wish we both Had forgotten everything behind, included clothes,
and this bench was a bed, a small bed, so you would have to sleep on my chest.
Tomorrow will be another day. Tomorrow will be another day without check in, without gates, without running, without reading books,
without delays, without waiting queues, without sweat, without planes landing, without the morbid wishes for a plane to crash, without escalatores everywhere, without you.
How I hate airports... How I love airports.
******* Airports... full of their welcome laughs and goodbye tears, their happy endings and melodramatics departures.
The sad concept of living it's all condensed in this place. You are never happy with what you got till you are sad for what you lost.
But I was happy with you. I was happy at the Dublin Airport.
Hazel McCath Jan 2016
black faded ink on parchment paper
these were the days
we knew dreams and eternity.

coffee stains on white fitted sheets
these were the days
we knew bliss and love

broken frames and burning cheeks
these were the days
we knew agony and nightmares

tequila shots, filling luggages and hasty departures
that was the day
I knew vacuity and broken promises
david jm Aug 2014
At times,
Cold departures leave
A stain of faith.
You're departure,
However hellish,
Remains immaculate,
Even as you turn
With a blizzard on your heel,
Kicking Winter in
My eye.

You replace him up there.
Not in piety but
In hierarchy,
Of the royal void breed.
I tailor the nails to your palm
And broken foot.
Drying like slaughterhouse
Meat on my clothesline.

I found our nature
Profoundly meaningless.
Was it transcendence?
Algor Mortis?
Or did my new eyes
Survive incubation?
I await the birth pangs
Of sight,
Callousing the whole,
From lid to lash.
My brother asked if this was about Jesus so I thought I should clarify that it is not, and I'm not Christian. This is about making something/someone (lover,parent,friend,addiction) into something almighty and overpowering,
but seeing them differently by the end (the departure) and not knowing if it's them who is different or your perspective (new eyes).
Jeffrey Pua Nov 2015
O breath-bloomed beast,
O phantom pulse,
O sweeper, swift,
O shadow scars
Of destinies
And designations,
Of heart's desire
And desperation,
And despair,
Downward detours
To despair, the deep Danube
Of departures, I detonate
The dormant dynamite
Of decent death,
Now, seal the sea
Of my seeping soul,
Let alone the love
And sshh the sails
Of sorrow, that I might
Greet her tomorrow,
With a trellis of tears
And a smile.

     A smile.*

© 2015 J.S.P.
Draft.
My life is made up of seconds
And they're ticking away.
At this very moment
I grow older
And memories are lost.

As noon turns to night,
And night turns to day
Images are blurred.
White noise,
Turning into silence.

Prolonged exposure to life,
The illusion of time takes over.
Summer falls and winter rises,
Identity lost,
Yourself just out of reach.

Arrivals and departures,
Of the shadow children.
The door shuts,
And the pendulum
Slowly stops swinging.

Everything comes and goes,
And everything changes.
On a long enough time line
The survival rate of everyone
Drops to zero.
Sean Hunt May 2016
The eleventh of May
The date of today
Was the day of the birth
On this fortunate earth
Of a poet of note
Of Keith Wilson I speak
Published, prolific
Read in the cities
Read on the beach
On tablets and towers
They love his technique
From flowers and gardens
To grief and departures
His readers rejoice and celebrate
This holy happy date

Sean Hunt  Windermere  2016
Thomas EG Sep 2015
Our sun-kissed smiles
From the summer time
Wave goodbye, wave away
The rest of the sunshine

We accept their departures
And trudge on, to arrive
On depression's doorstep
In this sweater weather

The rain pours down
The curtains are closed
The windows steam up
Either way

We pull up our covers
Pull closer our lovers
And make our own kisses
We can make our own smiles
Autumn has arrived :-)
Melody Mann Dec 2023
looking up looks good on you,

you weren’t of this world,

your heart was beyond the realms of reason,

a ray of sunshine returns to its source today,

continuing to shower her light on life as she did for 84 years.

Looking up looks good on you,

you make mortality beautiful with such celestial hues,

bringing peace to the plants you tended,

solace to the animals you fed,

and warmth to the hearts you touched.

looking up looks good on you.

Watching her as the last breath had already left her grasp… to see a light cease… was a conflicted reality. She was there — but gone. Finally freed from the cycle of samsara. Touching her face, seeing the color wash away the pains of yesterday, and feeling her body chill to a gruesome cold… it was in that moment I realized she won’t complain i’m cold anymore. She will warm and light up the sky with her smiles now.

Mortality is but a fickle yet omnipresent reminder to cherish each moment as it scatters past our horizons. It is but a gentle reminder to hold onto hugs a minute longer, savor a conversation a sentence deeper, and sit in the sunshine till dusk greets our departures. It is in the everyday we remain rooted in the reality of what lies hidden in the inevitable. Thus, in the moments mortality beacons at our doorstep — sending the gruesome chill of conclusion up your spine — cherish the warmth that radiates within your waking breath. It is in the inhale and exhale we seldom forget the gift of today that is bestowed on our conscious.

The ability to create, to debate, to deliberate on the topics that itch our fascination lies within mere moments of the now. She taught us to immerse ourselves in the ravishing splendor that life is because the inevitable looms above us all. Such a kindred spirit was she, a woman with a heart of gold. A soul that radiated in a light blind to the common eye. She held onto a glow that constellations graced — a burning light in of herself.

looking up looks good on you.
journal musings from the morning after your departure; an ode to my grandmother.
surei Aug 2013
The slight curvature of the edges on his eyes would say:
"I am the wave, the tornado, tsunami that will wipe your glass wall
clear from all the dust and mud that you've chosen to ***** it with."

And yet, I feel like his walls are still marked too
from all the days he spent wondering about love,
and Love.

And from all the days he gave his heart out to the words on his notebook paper
to talk about longing, arrivals,
and departures of the heart.

And from all the minutes he spent listening
to all my words - without clarity nor coherence of the concept which I was talking about -
Instead, he let me
blabber.

Now those doe-eyes.
They glimmer with the confidence
of clearing everyone's wall,
but before that,
perhaps I need to plant a seed that is the Self within him
so that he'll clean his first.
John Reilly Dec 2017
What are we
looking for
Lost voyeurs
Scrolling thru
Each other's lives
At breakneck speeds
Time traveling
From Not present
To inaccessible  
An unconscious collective
Our departures marked
By blue screen glare
And a vacant stare
Intelligent phone
Intransigence drones
The United State of
Learned helplessness
Johnnyqu33r Jun 2021
Comfortable rectangle
Entanglements
Stranger sleeping
Feeling, breathing
Mostly dreaming

Self exploration
Starlit sobbing
Skin cells
Sweat beads
Strands of hair

Morning whispers
Morning breath
Laughing, touching
Alarm clocks
Departures
Sjr1000 Oct 2016
Like a plane in the
fog
looking for a place to
land
Like a man in a
homeless shelter listening for the rapture
A pelican on a pier
eyeing his next meal
the last apple on a
tree all ready
to fall

Remember I started with blue
skies in front of me
I studied my flight plan well
I knew I'd be landing

I knew for sure
it wasn't going to be hell
I always tried to do so well,
focusing in on innocence
when ever I was able to

But there are failures of compass
The phantom captain takes
a nap

The instruments may keep on
saying you're right on track
But
the only trust I have is
in the Northern Star
and in Mars high
in the sky.

It seems impossible
to be so lost

Like a plane in the
fog
looking for somewhere
to land.

Like a woman working tables
until two a.m.
Her fitness app keeps saying
a hundred years this shift

The fuel is evaporating
The miles to go before zero
keeps hopping

Like a whale without a culture
no one to talk to
The sky is a 300 mile high
air ocean
I thought I was free
to get from here to there

Like a window with a view
of a brick wall

Phoenix in the summer
A tsunami on dry land
A river without a name
A cougar and no game

Like a lover whose left
and no way to find their name

So many aspects of this life
Departures and arrivals
a one way ticket

There is a great darkness
out in the distance
I know it's getting closer
but
I keep on drifting

Like a plane in the fog
looking for a place to land.
A nod to Leonard
Love has never hurt me. As negative and as pessimistic as I can be, I love love. Nothing negative has ever come from being so wholly connected to another person.

Love is indescribable. If it means anything, I still think of Annie every day. Every time I look up at the stars I see her pale skin and her York peppermint patty eyes. I miss her everyday. And I think about what she's doing over in San Diego and if she has enough to eat and if she's safe and if people treat her right. And I want to follow her, but I choose not to because I love her enough to let her go. I know she wouldn't have me now, and I won't force it. But I love her and I want her to be okay. And if she comes to me one day, I will be happy, and if she doesn't, I will still be happy to have loved her and been with her.

I dream with her. About her. And I sing songs about what it was like to be blessed by her. I remember the smell of her hair and how soft her cheeks were when I touched them. I remember holding her in my arms as we looking at children's puzzle books and solving them together. Laughing and smiling so innocently. I'm smiling now, even knowing I almost ended my life days ago. Even knowing I may never see or speak to Annie Wright again. I loved her and that was pure and is pure.
Arrivals
Morrey Dec 2010
So clear yet so clever
this never ending street,
overflowing with sigh..
Arrivals doesn't mean forever
yet departures won't be goodbye..
12-20-10
copyright Morrey
Raj Arumugam Feb 2011
There may be journeys we undertake;
there will be long departures
and separations
There will be pain and agony
and each may be taken
from the other
And yet, yet, O gentle heart
yet the bonds will live and bring back one to one;
yet the bonds of mother, child, father, brother and sister
these bonds will surpass all pain;
and the family, that bond of love
that will live, that love will radiate
no matter what the world shall deal and ******
into one’s hearts and hands
O hold on to that love
that love of father, son
man, woman
mother and daughter and brother and sister
for that is all, that love is all that lasts and endures
FINAL in series of 8 poems “Songs for Sansho the Bailiff”.
This series of poems is based on the film “Sansho the Bailiff “ (1954) by Kenji Mizoguchi. Set in medieval Japan, the film tells the tragic tale of a family that lives by the father’s ideal that one should be just to others, even if that goodness is inconvenient to oneself. The family is separated and endures all sorts of suffering in living this ideal
A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n
Frances Marie Aug 2017
You cannot possibly imagine what I saw today, trying to keep my mind at bay.

Minding their own business came a pair.
Inseparable.
Even one could say
Destructible.
But where does this line cross with me and this duo?
That I may owe.

With a sigh I hang my head low, the thought of another gruesome blow.
In curiosity or spite
I do not know when these two are ready to bite.

Are they hungry or is it loyalty they are after?
I do not know;
I am only an outsider to those hounds that dug for what was already gone.

Prey they once tried to feast on.
Bound to this sickening notion; the false lulls of security they once had.

Something they could only turn into the gritty,
Painless pity,
Insufferable grabs of ***** filth they once called a party.

Once a whole, a group that dissolved slowly under the time of an hour glass.

From birth to death we breath.
Grasp at anything we can hold ourselves accountable without being the accused.
Departures to new comers we welcomed as our own.
Only to be betrayed and left out at dawn.

Now today I stand as proof of a wolf who alas left the pack; we once called ourselves a flock of deer in disguise.
Friends of the past got the best of me, so I wrote my emotions out because it helps.
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2014
an aisle seat,
my choice,
I get to watch
Noah's children
board one by one

it is a miracle!

I swear the plane
expands
cause no way
we young fools all
fit
in this
silver cylindrical sliver
chamber of
aliens, skinny jeans, needy for haircuts,
wailing babies and kids

the captain says its time
to pull away from the gate,
pull together, hold hands,
pray for our deliverance
from turbulent winds and
mechanical malfunction
and the sundry ways fates
render us asunder

when next we see safe port,
dry land, nobody knows,

but this ship, a prayer,
built of titanium prayers,
this ship is earth bound
bringing home the lost children,
our return flight,
pinging bright
the signal of our existence,
to ease the brow of those
who mourn our premature departures

the stewardesses lead us in prayer:

"Georgia, Georgia,
No peace I find,
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind"


this is my happy ending,
this, my happy days,
I believe with perfect faith,
you and I will be reunited
on a dock by the bay,
perhaps even the one
beside my real name,
the hour when the ship comes in

June 6th, 2014

NML
This is my mystical sight
that sneaks into my brain,
stakes a place,
when love and sad fuse
and my fingers fly
as if -no- because I am possessed
by the greatness of what humans can do, be, see,
and believe

for those who know for whom it was writ,
I dedicate and wait with perfect faith for
that homecoming game when all are victorious

in the meantime I kayak the bay looking for signs...poems...anything...
Donall Dempsey Sep 2018
ARRIVALS & DEPARTURES

( for Bud on his birthday that was never to be )

Never to be
met by you again

at the airport
with a hastily scribbled sign:

"WAITING FOR GOD...
KNOWS WHO!"

Or telling me you were
expecting the Cat in the Hat.

One year a tip-top topper...
...the next a battered bowler.

Always. . .
your smile

my gold coin

your laughter
my treasure.

"Ahhhh Jaysus, Bud...tears?"
cries the ghost of you.

"It's all I get these days!
Dying is so...annoying!"

"Oh, before I go. . !"
the ghost of you smirks

before fading away
into an EXIT sign.

"I love the purple
fedora!"
Tatiana May 2018
All aboard the train lost to time,
feel it lurch forwards as bells chime.
Signal this present departure of mine,
and past departures on this narrow line.
© Tatiana
Kitt Aug 2024
I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.

Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?

But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.

“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--

Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.

As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?
“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art... like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”
Joseph Fink, 2018

“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.”
Margaret Atwood, 1985

"The morally cultivated man, and only he, is wholly free. Either he is superior to nature as a force, or he is at one with her. Nothing that she can do to him is violence because before it reaches him it has already become his own action."
Friedrich Schiller, circa 1801

"Mrs "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest."
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

“I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
Elizabeth Nov 2013
of innocent and
illicit meetings,

of scalding coffee
and **** cider,

of October air
and goosebumps,

of piercing stares
and demure blushes,

of nervous laughter
and bright eyed smiles,

of beautiful stupidity
and exquisite risk taking,

of sweet shyness
and hesitant touches,

of passionate giving
and exhausted joy,

of shared secrets
and utter honesty,

of motorcycle rides
and smiling skulls,

of early morning coffee
and late night magic tricks,

of story telling
and musical laughter,

of leopard spots
and three quick kisses,

of secret meetings
and getting caught,

of forbidden words
and transparent hearts,

of hands wiping
away escaped tears,

of sad departures
and naked good byes,

of miles and miles
of never ending distance,

of long awaited phone calls
and lengthy emails,

of sleepless nights
and lonely days,

of miles and miles
that separate,

of silence,

of war,

of long awaited contact,

of letters,

of wounds,

of silence,

of deafening silence,

of love

of heart ache.
Elicia Hurst Jan 2019
.
to Emilia,
you are the method to my madness


I will cry my heart out now
for every hypothetical tragedy.
I’ll break my heart now
so I don’t have to— in another life,
or a life yet to come,
drown myself in some apocalyptic loss.
Unceremonious

departures. Haunt me for life.
Mourn you for all the ways you’d die.
Prepare myself for inconsolable grief
in a simulation of a graveyard.
Tombstone upon tombstone:
Dug, prodded, buried, sunk.

My dear,
to my dismay, you are but a mortal,
implicated in the immortality of love.
In the book of all conclusions,
written in an indecipherable tongue,
your name engraved in feeble marble,
an expiration date in bright, blinding red.

How can we cheat Oblivion?
How do we defy Death?

You shrug with a confident nonchalance.

What is Death to Love Imperishable?  
What is Eternity of a moment to Oblivion?

We are in the dress rehearsal
for the season’s première and the grand finale.
The Universe has been on our side all along,
it’s poured every blood, toil and tear into
years of conspiration and orchestration,
for our one delicate point convergence.
One chance against all odds.
One intersection against all parallels.
So come what may—
Take my hand and break a leg.
Jan 2019
Of all my misnomers,
Mistooks of arrogance,
To think I could career careen
A life
in poetry,
Extra pressure of the
Broadest of a narrowing sujet,
the scripting of poesy
on the restricted topical
of only love poetry

Must have been punch love drunk,
When that notion crazy stung
My cerebal,
Gored discor-ed cortex,
Probably just another
Post a Loving,
dreaming scheming moment,
Or reading a Shakespeare sonnet,
Or
Midst the long lonely pauses
somewhere,
(S)under the rainbow,
tween  teener and geezer,
and
Everything in between

made myself a poet of a restricted diet
not "eating " for days at a time

for love comes and goes,
frequent departures much more easygoing & common,
than regularly scheduled arrivals,
easy go, not so easy come,
what was I thinking of?

what a she-muk,
talking about cutting your nose off
to spite your face,
Colzz MacDonald Apr 2017
I conclude that I hate the world today
Everything people are and what they say
They speak no kind words by gesture or sound
There is no common decency around
People are not nice like they were before
I hate that there's no respect anymore
We are seriously lacking dignity
To a human race no affinity
We're all offended or aggravated
Whilst we act so cold and calculated
There's very few out there who won't pretend
Everyone's an enemy to a friend
We are ultimately in regression
Forcing ourselves into an oppression
Like we've gone back to the days of the cave
Not so the Stone Age ways should we enslave
Is it all about tearing someone apart?
Does anyone have love left in their heart?
Don't mean to be unkind
But if you wouldn't mind
I'd like to step off the planet now please
We are giving such little guarantees
I will take you with me
If you would like to see
An end to this ****** scrutinising show
Time to leave ~ to somewhere *only we know
Anyone have a TARDIS laying around they're not using at all? I was told to ask for The Doctor?
Melody Mann Dec 2023
Alas it was but in that moment, when your soul cascaded into the night sky, that I understood what a goodbye truly meant. A chill crawled down my spine as your body grew colder by the minute beneath my touch; a solemn awakening on my conscience as grief greeted me yet again. This familiar path I feared to embark on again has resurfaced, baring with its somber recollections - I witnessed you…finally at rest.

Her arms would never turn the corner to greet me as I landed from my flight,
The warmth in her laughter shall fall to silent ears as the house ceases to echo,
Those eyes would never challenge the radiance of the sun again,
For it was in this moment I embraced the season of change, the art of letting go.

Letting go is a natural part of life that arises in manners we may never consider. May it be a goodbye placed upon a past lover, a former roommate, an old apartment, even a job site - goodbyes signify the end of a chapter. 2023 bore many moments of letting go for me as I relished in the art of departure. I lost my grandmother, the woman who raised me. This emotion was overwhelming as it marked the beginning of her legacy that I am now adorned to live. I have encountered many moments of goodbye this year: moving states, a heartbreaking end to a relationship, ending a program, seeking a new field of employment, ending a friendship - the list is exhaustive. Yet, it wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother I truly recognized the beauty of letting go.

The art of departure entails embracing what once was whilst creating space for what is to come. Letting go is freeing yourself of expectations - rather having abundant expectancy.
Ron Sparks Aug 2023
staring
at Departures,
waiting with futile hope
that my flight's not cancelled; let me
get home
light scrunched, a crouched shadow.
eyes discern heaviness of
ordinary places into various flows
   of gutted fish.

this world gives away a weathered image:
its wraith comes unannounced

lovelessly drags the stooping gait
of walls, obscenely expires
   a small clearing

this mundane home gives way
to a restless flow of other dimensions.

bird of the afternoon
reaches far beyond extensions.
discombobulated tendril of light
   flashes its fullness
to a bedrock of reality.

the kitchenwares start to falter
but all for the way, where once
gray hair graced this table,
her vividly tremulous hand steadies
  a fixed touch on bedspread —

on the wet back of freshly bathed fruits,
  a metonymy that continues to bruise.

morning's watery hands part to meet
the mist of departures;

quietly as we all are, seldom imposed
an overhung dark, and as quiet as you,

                                                do not go.
time is
the space in which we grow
   without awareness
   in our early years
structured by meals
   arrivals and departures
   light and dark
   hot and cold
   school   studies  play  adventures
   celebrations
and by waiting
   anxiously or not
for things to happen

time is
that feeling
that we may not have enough of it
in our later years
busy with jobs and family and travel
covering long distances in order to
achieve and educate and care

time is
what starts to rush by us
with increasing speed
in our final years
making us wonder
what it really means

that space
by which we measure
our lives
   our universes
      our worlds

time is
Nunu Sep 4
the world keeps walking ahead,
and i’m still at the platform,
watching trains pull away
with everyone whom i thought
would wait for me.

the announcements echo names
that are never mine,
and the doors always close
a second too soon—
as if the universe decided
i was meant to stand
in the silence
between departures.
been fascinated with trains lately. they carry the hopes, hugs, and farewells of many - too intangible to see, but enough to feel.
Dante Rocío Aug 2020
Though another day passes,
once having arrived,
cinnamon sunny
with a misguided preaching
from a catholic church,

I recall our gorgeous
misty evening
right by the waves
from yesterday
and its one peculiar
moment:
my dad pointed to
a far away regatta
sailing in
a distance
whilst standing to my
right and asked
me not quoting

“Do you know why
I wanted to go
to the sea?
The vastness of that body,
no endings in infinity,
no one to tell me
what to do,
and once you sailed away
from the harbour
it was just
it
living.

Whilst I was on my night shift
at the very front
of the ship
on my ever first voyage
by sea,
heading to
England from Gdynia,
I felt as if I
was the very first
man to discover the oncoming
land,
like Cristopher Columbus
with his dear Santa María
breaking the waves”.

Yes, Dad.
I would add,
settled in my question

“Why do I long somehow
in smaller
or bigger
ways too at
times for that
aforementioned harbour
and otherness with so many
sounds, details,
lights and
dancing dangerous like
knives in a tavern
thrown?
For so similar
yet
so privately schemed
departures I paint?”,

I would answer
without Brain,
even if it would be solely
in perfect, dreamy way
sketched:

“Because there is
some greater and
truer breath
of mine held out
by a foreign hand
or by standing lonely
from the other mirror’s side
in front of some tremendous
waves of Kanagawa,
hugging itself small
yet with fearless Child’s
patience, like
the Young Verter
on his painting.
Some more abstract
and
breathtaking
with charisma image
of me there
stands, flowing
instead of walking,
through called aisles.
Beige coat into the
blue falling.

The No Man’s Skies
and Lands
(or yet
Of Some Men)
to be felt with all
the body and
upraising in all hues
and minute sacrifices
in speechless
wonders,
like lagoon’s turquoise
water that would shine
in a cave’s dark
with krill dancing.”

Some upholdings,
some blind images
and all rest
fresh,
windy,
dark
and light with grey
whose voicing
I cannot make,
not just to keep
it in immaculation
to stay non-maimed.

Tss
Ouch.
The Missing.

El,
ese,
acantilado.
Why do I keep having this dream?
These might be now only flickers
Of a proof to come and test it once for all.
Probably a family inheritance
I get in blood or sight
From Adam
So often yet at times

— The End —